One of the pleasures of this Jesuit life is being a part of such a remarkably mobile international organization. In my community at Loyola Chicago, one regularly sits down to dinner next to a Bolivian, a Nigerian, a Brazilian, a German, and a Pole. And the latter two don’t even fight.

The last of these, our resident Polish priest, has been urging me for some time to take a look at a favorite Polish philosopher, whose name had too many consonants in it for me to remember. I admit, I wasn’t overly eager to dive into tomes of what I was sure would be grim and turgid prose. When I returned to the house after our Christmas break, however, I found a book by Leszek Kolakowski in my mailbox. I had been outflanked by the Polish intelligentsia!

Once I read the title, I was won over: My Correct Views on Everything. The title comes from the rejoinder Kolakowski wrote in The Socialist Register to the British Marxist E.P Thompson. Both Thompson and Kolakowski had started off as communists, and both had experienced some disillusionment after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Kolakowski’s questioning had run deeper, however, and led him to see that Marxism itself, and not just its manifestation in Stalinism, was rotten to the core.

Whosoever Desires

to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, and to serve the Lord alone and the Church his Spouse, under the Roman pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth, should, after a vow of perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience, keep the following in mind." From the Formula of the Institute, 1540